In boot camp down South they called him “Boston” and delighted listening in on phone calls to hear his mom’s Fall River accent.

To his family he was “Mr. Fix It.”

Alfred Andrews remembers Scott, the youngest of three sons, at age 9, assembling a wood and metal park bench that remains outside the front picture window of his ex-wife’s home at 93 Martha St.

“He used to fix whatever I messed up,” said middle brother Matthew, a year-and-a-half older, lanky and dark-haired, who looks almost like Scott's twin.

“He was an amazing young man, very focused. He knew what he wanted to do and made it happen,” Jo Ann Mello said of Army Specialist Scott A. Andrews. Insurgents killed him and other NATO soldiers during an attack last Monday in Afghanistan.

“I had nightmares about it right after Scott was gone, but I never thought it would happen,” the mother said of her brave and skillful son.

With a flood of special memories and smiles talking about Scott, who turned 21 on Memorial Day, Mello proudly held a photo of her with him in full dress uniform in the kitchen. It was taken on Thanksgiving, the last time they saw him.

“He had very sapphire blue eyes,” she said of her handsome son, who laughed freely except when his picture was taken.

His spotty grades and attendance record at B.M.C. Durfee High School prevented him from going to the city’s vocational school at Diman.

“So the Army was his resource to teach him how to fix and drive heavy equipment,” Andrews said. A truck driver himself, he told his son, “There’s a lot more money in fixing ‘em than driving ‘em.”

With his GED in hand, his goal after the service was to attend diesel mechanic school in this area while serving in the Army Reserves, his parents said.

The soldier was a recovery vehicle mechanic with the 618th Engineer Support Company, 27th Engineer Battalion, 20th Engineer Brigade out of Fort Bragg, N.C.

“Specialist Andrews was an absolutely stellar soldier and mechanic,” Capt. Steve Holmberg, the 618th company’s commander, said in a statement.

“There was nothing Specialist Andrews couldn’t fix, and he would burn the midnight oil regularly to accomplish the mission. It was a true pleasure having him around,” he said.

Further praising the decorated solider, Holmberg said, “He always had a smile on his face, was ready for any challenge and always went above and beyond to get the job done. This is a loss that this company and the Army will feel for years to come.”

“We tried to do what every parent would do,” his mother said of urging her son not to serve in the military during two dangerous wars. Smiling, she said, “We were wasting our breath.”

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“Scott was Scott,” his father added.

Since enlisting in February 2008, then being dispatched to Afghanistan a couple of days after Christmas, he’d call his folks — his dad and oldest brother David, 29, at Wellington Street, his mom and Matthew at Martha Street where Scott also lived — at any hour.

“I wouldn’t tell him it was 3 o’clock in the morning,” his father said. “He could call any time he wanted.”

Before he’d set out on a dangerous mission, which he couldn’t discuss, he’d call home.

“He’d call and say, ‘Dad, I’m going to be out on a mission.’”

“Where are you Scott?” his mother would ask her good-humored son.

“He’d say, ‘Here.’”

They talked a little about his final mission. They knew he was driving a 5-ton tow truck, part of a convoy of an improvised explosive device engineering company.

If a truck needed repairs or blew up, it was his job to fix it or tow it back to Base Lagman in the Zabul province.

“I was sitting home. He didn’t call me for Father’s Day. I knew something was wrong,” Fred Andrews said, his tears visible behind his glasses. He shook thinking about his son being gone.

At noon the Monday after Father’s Day, the military delivered the news to them, hours after he died from an IED explosion.

Matthew talked about how he and his cousin Garret so looked forward to his brother’s scheduled leave in October and completed tour in December. They liked to fish in Tiverton, where the Andrews family owned a little place.

Matthew remembered Thanksgiving and how he and Scott went to a haunted cemetery in Bristol, R.I., and a supposedly haunted institution in Lakeville. “He was obsessed with haunted things,” said Matthew, 22.

The family said it was another fearless side of the youngest son. “He dragged us into all those places. He went into all those creepy places in the South,” said Matthew, bemused.

The youngest was also the one to do the yard work at home. And when the soldier heard Matthew had messed up the lawn mower and the weed whacker, he told his mother, “Tell him not to touch any of that stuff until I get home.”

When he was that 9-year-old boy with a hands-on touch, his father remembered how the newly assembled park bench needed an adjustment. He could see the screws didn’t line up where they should have been counter-sunk into the holes, he said.

“The only thing he did wrong was he put the boards in upside down,” Fred Andrews said. A trace of admiration remained, more than a decade later.

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Outside, a bit of brown paint chipped from those boards, where the bench sat against a layered wall of symmetrical flat stones. Orange tiger lilies blossomed next to it, and nearby blue hydrangeas sparkled at the home and city where Scott Anthony Andrews has left his mark.